This operation may also have the strategic goals of demonstrating the advantages of cyber-security and information-security agreements, which are the Russian long desired objectives, in the face of potential threats to the nature and the structure of the current regime (e.g. elections) in the age of the Internet and Social Media.

“In the days before the Sept. 24 parliamentary election, the Oxford researchers foundthat political bots were minimally active on Twitter in Germany.

The most tweets tracked were in support of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, which won 13 percent of the vote and became the first far-right party to earn a presence in Parliament in 60-plus years. The research also found that Germans were much less likely to share fake news stories than their American counterparts, sharing links from professional news organizations four times as often as links from sites pushing fake news. Researchers theorize that voters in Germany and other parts of Europe may have been inoculated to the effects of bot-driven fake news, thanks to the ongoing fallout from 2016. “I would speculate the Russians overplayed their hand in the US elections,” Bradshaw says. “Voters in the US weren’t really prepared, but that was part of the discourse in other countries like Germany.”

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are almost 200,000 Americans working for broadcast television and cable programming, 197,000 employed in digital publishing and broadcasting, 183,000 working for newspapers, 99,000 working for magazines, 86,000 in radio, and 64,000 employed in the editing and production of books. Asking survey respondents to briefly summarize their feelings about the daily work of one million strangers is asking for an impossible…

Twitter’s bot army is so widespread that as many as 15% of its monthly active users—49 million, based on Twitter’s latest figure for its total user base—may be bots, estimated a study (pdf, p. 9) of English-speaking accounts earlier this year. Groups like Securing Democracy are attempting to track Russian propaganda on the network, by tracking “hashtags, topics and URLs promoted by Russia-linked influence networks” there.

The use of bots and trolls in the 2016 presidential election has become a point of national concern, especially since Facebook revealed that 470 accounts and pages managed by a notorious Russian troll farm, the Internet Research Agency, bought more than 3,000 ads during the election season. Many independent researchers have mapped how information increasingly flows back and forth among such platforms as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, with each amplifying and sometimes manipulating information appearing on other platforms.

Lawmakers and Capitol Hill investigators have pushed major technology companies to disclose what they know about deployment of propaganda and disinformation on their platforms during the campaign.

Howard said junk news originates from three main sources that the Oxford group has been tracking: Russian operatives, Trump supporters and activists part of the alt-right, a group that includes white nationalists, anti-Semites and others who rail against “political correctness.”

“Those three kinds of organizations shared a lot of content and push a lot of each other’s content,” Howard said. “They worked in concert. They worked to the same ends, the goal being getting polarizing stuff into the swing states…

The report identified 16 ­battleground states. Of those, the researchers said, 12 received higher-than-normal flows of propaganda and other low-quality information near the election: Ohio, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Colorado, North Carolina, Nevada, Michigan, Missouri and Arizona, along with Virginia, New Hampshire and Florida. Four battleground states — Iowa, Minnesota, Maine and Wisconsin — got less low-quality information on Twitter than the nation as a whole.”

The Russian authorities and their proxies use a wide variety of tools to achieve soft regime change, meaning getting Putin-friendly politicians into office. With politicians who are soft on Russia, Putin gets effective allies who are less willing to defend Ukraine’s territorial integrity or stand up to Russia’s subversive efforts in the West.

Knowing this, Moscow’s view of German politics becomes more clear…

On the far left is Moscow’s reliable ally Die Linke. Their agenda is clear: Bash the West and the U.S. for everything and always relativize Russia’s atrocities. On the far right, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), whose funding remains unclear, openly advocates for Russia; one of its foreign policy priorities is appeasement. It’s no wonder these two parties are called the Kremlin’s Trojan Horses. Both vocalize Russia’s foreign policy objectives and have real political presence, though they have limited influence on German and EU policy as a whole. They drive conversation about policies the Kremlin cares about, but they cannot directly influence their implementation.

Putin’s goals in Germany are obvious: Break Berlin’s policy on sanctions and support for Ukraine, put Germany at odds with Washington, and push through Nord Stream 2 to side line Germany’s allies in Eastern Europe and increase Berlin’s dependency on Russian energy supply.

In the days before the Sept. 24 parliamentary election, the Oxford researchers found that political bots were minimally active on Twitter in Germany. The most tweets tracked were in support of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, which won 13 percent of the vote and became the first far-right party to earn a presence in Parliament in 60-plus years. The research also found that Germans were much less likely to share fake news stories than their American counterparts, sharing links from professional news organizations four times as often as links from sites pushing fake news. Researchers theorize that voters in Germany and other parts of Europe may have been inoculated to the effects of bot-driven fake news, thanks to the ongoing fallout from 2016. “I would speculate the Russians overplayed their hand in the US elections,” Bradshaw says. “Voters in the US weren’t really prepared, but that was part of the discourse in other countries like Germany.”

Research published today by a group at Oxford university shows that the rightwing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) drives more Twitter traffic than any major German party, and more even than non-partisan discussion of the upcoming general election itself.

The study by the Oxford Computational Propaganda project found that, of almost 1m tweets collected between September 1 and 10, hashtags associated specifically with the AfD appeared in more than 30 per cent.

The AfD, which hopes to win its first seats in the German parliament on Sunday, is “highly salient in the German Twitter sphere”, the study concludes. Lead researcher Lisa-Maria Neudert told the FT that the AfD “absolutely dominates” German political Twitter traffic.

Ms Neudert said: “AfD is very vocal on social media. They have a big following and a good communications strategy, a social media-first strategy.” The study does not distinguish between Twitter traffic supporting the AfD and that opposing it.

The study also found that the overall proportion of traffic generated by highly automated accounts, known as bots, was “not substantial”, although the level of automation was highest for traffic using AfD-related hashtags.

The AfD is the most successful rightwing populist party in Germany since the second world war. Its stated aim is “the self-preservation not the self-destruction of our state and our people” and its policies include the “closure of all German borders”. The party is expected to win 50 or more seats in Sunday’s election.

The study’s publication comes after a week in which dominant social media companies faced renewed scrutiny over their — largely opaque — role in shaping political discourse. Facebook handed over information to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US election after revealing that Russian-linked users had purchased at least $100,000 worth of advertising on the site.

Original FT analyses of Twitter and Facebook data show how the AfD’s social media position has the potential to provide the fulcrum for a shift in German political discourse towards the far right, and that such a shift may already be in progress.

Mapping the Twitter relationships between more than 700 Bundestag candidates identified as users of the social media platform by transparency campaign group Abgeordnetenwatch.de shows the extent to which the AfD is distinct from the political mainstream. Candidates for the major parties are more likely to follow each other, whereas few AfD candidates follow those of other parties and vice versa.

Ms Neudert, the Oxford researcher, put the number of Twitter users in Germany at 1m — a fraction of the more than 30m German Facebook users. However, she noted, Twitter is considered important by “opinion leaders and influencers” and serves as a channel for open communication between politicians and journalists.

With over 350,000 likes — more than two of the largest parties, CDU and SPD, put together — the AfD has a similarly formidable Facebook presence. While user engagement with the party on Facebook grew steadily throughout the refugee crisis of summer 2015, its biggest ever boost came after an outcry over a spate of sexual assaults in Cologne and other German cities on New Year’s Eve 2015, when the number of reactions to AfD posts tripled to more than 380,000 within a month. Many of the perpetrators of the assaults were asylum seekers or illegal immigrants, and the episode helped to push the AfD’s level of Facebook engagement to new heights.

It was not only the level of engagement with the party that rose following the New Year’s Eve attacks. The tone of the AfD Facebook page changed: words and phrases which, in Germany, are most closely associated with the Nazi era began to appear more frequently in the comments users were posting on the page.

Based on academic research and interviews with two leading German political language researchers, the FT compiled a list of 25 terms associated with the Nazi era and/or other German nationalistic ideologies. We then used original software to determine how often these terms appear in user comments on the AfD Facebook page.

In May 2015, an average of 2.6 of the terms were used across all comments per AfD post. A year later, this figure had risen to 29.6 — an increase of 1,100 per cent. Among the most frequently used terms were “Volksverräter” (traitor to the people) and “Altparteien” (establishment parties), both of which have strong Nazi connotations.

Terms such as “national” and “patriot” have also seen rises in frequency. While ostensibly uncontroversial, these are among the terms with a more problematic history in Germany.

The number of distinct Facebook users to use such terms in comments also increased, and though the use of this language has fallen since its peak in early 2016, it remains significantly higher than for much of the page’s existence.

Twitter executives will be grilled tomorrow morning (Sept. 28) on Capitol Hill by members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is probing Russia’s meddling in the US presidential election.

The main focus of the questioning will be automated Twitter accounts, a.k.a. bots, and whether Twitter is doing enough to curb the ones that are spreading propaganda and misinformation, one person briefed on the committee’s preparations told Quartz.

Twitter’s bot army is so widespread that as many as 15% of its monthly active users—49 million, based on Twitter’s latest figure for its total user base—may be bots, estimated a study (pdf, p. 9) of English-speaking accounts earlier this year. Groups like Securing Democracy are attempting to track Russian propaganda on the network, by tracking “hashtags, topics and URLs promoted by Russia-linked influence networks” there.

“We’ve heard they [Twitter] don’t do a good job of removing ‘sock puppet IDs’ [Twitter users pretending to be someone else] or Russian bots,” the person briefed said. Senators are worried that bots spewing political spam or hijacking conversations result in real information getting buried, this person said. They’re also interested in what effect bots retweeting articles and information may have on Google search results. Facebook may be doing a better job of monitoring its users and customers, and removing harmful fake ones, the committee believes.

“There a universal appreciation that bots are becoming problematic on Twitter,” Robert Gorwa, a researcher with the Project on Computational Propaganda at the Oxford Internet Institute, told Quartz. “What isn’t appreciated is how much Twitter has enabled this by encouraging automation.” Twitter’s developer policies tell users how to use automation and the company provide guides on how to use bots to spread messages, he noted.

In the early days of Twitter, bots were easy to spot by their “egg” avatars, unusual ratios of following to followers, or obviously machine-written tweets. Now, as many have fleshed-out Twitter profiles or even entire online personalities (pdf, p. 16) and technology has improved, “they’ve gotten so sophisticated, we can’t recognize them,” Gorwa said.

A Twitter spokesman told Quartz the company was cooperating with the committee and confirmed it would brief it this week. “Twitter deeply respects the integrity of the election process, a cornerstone of all democracies, and will continue to strengthen our platform against bots and other forms of manipulation that violate our terms of service,” the spokesman said.

After massive Kremlin-led disinformation campaigns against German Chancellor Angela Merkel during the height of the 2015-2016 migration wave, many expected such tactics to be a major element of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s effort to influence the German parliamentary elections. While disinformation remains one of Russia’s primary tools to subvert the West, the Kremlin has a larger strategy.

There are two games Russia plays.

First, Russia has a long-term strategy to disrupt Western democracies by exploiting their internal problems and supporting local extremists and pro-Kremlin forces. A principled response to Putin’s occupation of Ukraine, Georgia or Moldova—such as Merkel’s— is harder to pull through. As Russia sees it, if you cannot defeat the other team, tear down the playing field.

Secondly, Moscow employs short-term campaigns on a tactical level. This includes supporting Kremlin-preferred politicians and policies and attacking their opponents with hostile means. Such support was awarded to Marine Le Pen, Donald Trump, the “leave” vote in the Brexit referendum, and the “no” vote in the Dutch referendum on the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement. If such tactics are successful, Putin celebrates because he perceives the opponent as more dangerous.

The Russian authorities and their proxies use a wide variety of tools to achieve soft regime change, meaning getting Putin-friendly politicians into office. With politicians who are soft on Russia, Putin gets effective allies who are less willing to defend Ukraine’s territorial integrity or stand up to Russia’s subversive efforts in the West.

Knowing this, Moscow’s view of German politics becomes more clear.

Due to Merkel’s principled position, Germany is the key architect of Europe’s sanctions against Russia. That’s why she is the prime target of Putin’s hostile actions and is demonized by Russian puppet media.

Outside of the Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), every major party wants to soften Germany’s position on Russia. Conservative CSU, Merkel’s close partner, focuses its rhetoric on a “business-first” approach, no matter Russia’s violations of international law. The leader of center-right liberal FDPA, a probable coalition member, has publicly flirted with removing Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea from Germany’s foreign policy focus. The Greens, another probable coalition partner, have strong anti-Putin messaging, but its rhetoric verges on anti-American as well, helping Moscow massively.

On the far left is Moscow’s reliable ally Die Linke. Their agenda is clear: Bash the West and the U.S. for everything and always relativize Russia’s atrocities. On the far right, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), whose funding remains unclear, openly advocates for Russia; one of its foreign policy priorities is appeasement. It’s no wonder these two parties are called the Kremlin’s Trojan Horses. Both vocalize Russia’s foreign policy objectives and have real political presence, though they have limited influence on German and EU policy as a whole. They drive conversation about policies the Kremlin cares about, but they cannot directly influence their implementation.

Putin’s goals in Germany are obvious: Break Berlin’s policy on sanctions and support for Ukraine, put Germany at odds with Washington, and push through Nord Stream 2 to side line Germany’s allies in Eastern Europe and increase Berlin’s dependency on Russian energy supply.

Who in the German political establishment shares these goals? The Social Democrats (SPD). There are various possible roots for the SPD’s submissive policy towards Putin. It might be the phantom pain of Ostpolitik, a feeling that SPD has nothing to contribute on foreign policy other than differing with CDU on Russia. It might be the schroederization effect, where some leaders see the former chancellor’s lucrative Russian business deals as a potential path for themselves. It’s astounding that Schröder’s work for Putin doesn’t matter to SPD—he even got a hero’s welcome at its last party convention. It took Putin’s self-proclaimed friend accepting another position within Russia’s state-linked companies for German press to begin criticizing him. Schröder isn’t the only Putin-friendly former SPD boss. Matthias Platzeck also serves in the broader Kremlin-linked network, presiding over “Deutsch-Russisches-Forum,” frequently talking to Russian propaganda mouthpiece Sputnik, and befriendingformer KGB officer and Putin inner circle oligarch Vladimir Jakunin, who now runs his pro-Putin influence network directly from Berlin.

The ultimate reason that the Social Democrats support Putin’s foreign policy objectives may never be known, but the party is Putin’s most important advocate in the German political establishment. In contrast with Die Linke or AfD, SPD can shape policies.

Best-case scenario for Moscow is a CDU/CSU-SPD coalition, which would force Angela Merkel to be softer on Russia. Under this coalition, countries concerned with Russian aggression would have a principled backer in her, but Berlin wouldn’t be the leading force pushing back against Russia’s subversion of European democracies. Moreover, the Kremlin’s short-term project in Germany is Nord Stream 2, of which SPD is a key proponent. Because SPD has invested enormous political capital in it, Merkel wouldn’t block it—to do so would be too politically expensive. With this option off the table, Moscow will have its friends run the German opposition.

With SPD likely being out of the next coalition, Moscow lost big-time.

Jakub Janda is the head of the Kremlin Watch Program at the Prague-based European Values Think-Tank. He consults for governments on how to counter hostile foreign influence operations.

Clinton is in the midst of a media blitz to promote her new memoir, “What … they had been working toward, and the perfect Trojan Horse for Putin,” Clinton writes. … overturned their recent presidential election and ordered a new vote. … they were supposed to win,” Trump posted on social media in March.

In the media, the term “Trojan horse” quickly became shorthand for a …. but educationalists in the UShave studied similar approaches with …. Ofsted singled out its excellent provision for social, moral and religious care. … Birmingham city council had £650m cut from its budget between 2010 and 2016.

The Real Loser of Germany’s Election: Vladimir Putin … Angela Merkel during the height of the 2015-2016 migration wave, … of Putin’s hostile actions and is demonized by Russian puppet media. … It’s no wonder these two parties are called the Kremlin’s Trojan Horses. … The Social Democrats (SPD).

The comment, a remarkable step for the former Democratic nominee, exemplifies Clinton’s belief that President Donald Trump and his campaign could have knowingly received help from Russian operatives in the 2016 election.

Clinton has said previously that she conceded to Trump quickly and attended his inauguration because the nation’s peaceful transfer of power is critical. But her comments to NPR signal that as the depths of Russia’s interference are revealed she could envision a time when she questions Trump’s legitimacy as president.

NPR’s Terry Gross asked Clinton directly during the interview whether she would “completely rule out questioning the legitimacy of this election if we learn that the Russian interference in the election is even deeper than we know now?”

“No. I would not,” Clinton said.

close dialog

Gross asked: “You’re not going to rule it out?”

“No,” Clinton said. “I wouldn’t rule it out.”

Clinton is in the midst of a media blitz to promote her new memoir, “What Happened,”

and diagnostic for the Democratic Party going forward. The subsequent book tour has thrust Clinton back into the public eye after months largely out of the news.

In the book, Clinton casts Trump as a toxic but hapless leader who won the White House by preying on the nation’s fears. Nowhere in the book, however, does she directly question his legitimacy, although she certainly comes close in the 500-page memoir.

Glen Caplin, a spokesman for Hillary Clinton, reiterated in a statement after the interview aired that the former secretary of state “has said repeatedly the results of the election are over but we have to learn what happened.”

“I would hope anyone in America concerned about the integrity of our democracy would feel the same way if we got there. But we’re not,” Caplin said. “Right now Bob Mueller and several congressional committees are investigating to what extent the Russians impacted our election and who exactly helped them do so.”

Clinton devotes an entire chapter to Russia, saying that the nation’s intervention in the 2016 election — which is currently being investigating by a host of congressional panels and a special counsel — led to Trump’s win.

“In many ways, Trump is the embodiment of everything they had been working toward, and the perfect Trojan Horse for Putin,” Clinton writes.

She adds, “No foreign power in modern history has attacked us with so few consequences, and that puts us all at risk.”

Clinton, in her interview with Gross, adds that there are likely no avenues, however, for her to challenge the 2016 results if she feels she needs to.

“Basically I don’t believe there are. There are scholars, academics, who have arguments that it would be, but I don’t think they’re on strong ground,” she told Gross. “But people are making those arguments. I just don’t think we have a mechanism.”

“What happened in Kenya, which I’m only beginning to delve into, is that the Supreme Court there said there are so many really unanswered and problematic questions, we’re going to throw the election out and redo it,” Clinton said. “We have no such provision in our country. And usually we don’t need it.”

Clinton’s comments are sure to further Trump’s deeply held belief that investigations into Russia — and Democrats’ calls for further pressure on the White House — are nothing more than the left’s attempts to rewrite the 2016 election and make up for Clinton’s loss.

“This whole narrative is a way of saving face for Democrats losing an election that everyone thought they were supposed to win,” Trump posted on social media in March. “The Democrats are overplaying their hand. They lost the election, and now they have lost their grip on reality.”

In her book, Clinton also wrote that once the election was over, she felt she needed to help the transition to Trump’s presidency go smoothly.

“Still, I felt a responsibility to be there,” she wrote about attending Trump’s inauguration, no matter how painful. “The peaceful transfer of power is one of our country’s most important traditions.”

And she made the same case hours after her crushing loss, as she stood before the nation and her supporters to publicly concede the election.

“Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead. Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power,” she said. “We don’t just respect that. We cherish it.”

Three of the biggest social media giants on the planet, Facebook, Google and Twitter, have been called to testify in front of the Congressional investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election.

Tweeter-in-chief Donald Trump has made Twitter into a powerful alt-advertising media of his own, but says Facebook is lined up alongside the ‘lamestream’ media.

The trio is expected to give public testimony from November 1 but as yet none have confirmed they will attend.

The three companies have already been summoned to testify in front of the US Senate.

President Trump’s “election integrity” commission is scheduled to hold its … voting swung New Hampshire’s Senate election in 2016, and voting groups … who will present a series of sham statisticsand questionable studies to …

US voters shared large volumes of polarizing political news and information in the form of links to content from Russian, WikiLeaks and junk news sources. Was this low quality political information distributed evenly around the country, or concentrated in swing states and particular parts of the country? In this data memo we apply a tested dictionary of sources about political news and information being shared over Twitter in over a ten day period around the 2016 Presidential Election. Using self-reported location information, we place a third of users by state and create a simple index for the distribution of polarizing content around the country. We find that (1) nationally, Twitter users got more misinformation, polarizing and conspiratorial content than professionally produced news. (2) Users in some states, however, shared more polarizing political news and information than users in other states. (3) Average levels of misinformation were higher in swing states than in uncontested states, even when weighted for the relative size of the user population in each state. We conclude with some observations about the impact of strategically disseminated polarizing information on public life.

Millions of tweets were flying furiously in the final days leading up to the 2016 US presidential election. And in closely fought battleground states that would prove key to Donald Trump’s victory, they were more likely than elsewhere in America to be spreading links to fake news and hyper-politicized content from Russian sources and WikiLeaks, according to new research published Thursday by Oxford University.

Nationwide during this period, one polarizing story was typically shared on average for every one story produced by a professional news organization. However, fake news from Twitter reached higher concentrations than the national average in 27 states, 12 of which were swing states—including Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan, where Trump won by slim margins.

While it’s unclear what effect such content ultimately had on voters, the new study only deepens concerns about how the 2016 election may have been tweaked by nefarious forces on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media. “Many people use these platforms to find news and information that shapes their political identities and voting behavior,” says Samantha Bradshaw, a lead researcher for Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Project, which has been tracking disinformation strategies around the world since 2014. “If bad actors can lower the quality of information, they are diminishing the quality of democracy.”

Efforts by Vladimir Putin’s regime were among the polarizing content captured in the new Oxford study. “We know the Russians have literally invested in social media,” Bradshaw told Mother Jones, referring to reports of Russian-bought Facebook ads as well as sophisticated training of Russian disinformation workers detailed in another recent study by the team. “Swing states would be the ones you would want to target.”

The dubious Twitter content in the new study also contained polarizing YouTube videos–including some produced by the Kremlin-controlled RT network, which were uploaded without any information identifying them as Russian-produced. All the YouTube videos have since been taken down, according to Bradshaw; it’s unclear whether the accounts were deleted by the users, or if YouTube removed the content.

The Oxford researchers captured 22 million tweets from Nov. 1-11, 2016, and have been scrutinizing the dataset to better understand the impact of disinformation on the US election. The team also has analyzed propaganda operations in more than two dozen countries, using a combination of reports from trusted media sources and think tanks, and cross-checking that information with experts on the ground. Their recent research has additional revelations about how disinformation works in the social-media age, including from Moscow:

In studying Russia’s propaganda efforts targeting both domestic and international populations, the Oxford researchers found evidence of increasing military expenditures on social media operations since 2014. They also learned of a sophisticated training system for workers employed by Putin’s disinformation apparatus: “They have invested millions of dollars into training staff and setting targets for them,” Bradshaw says. She described a working environment where English training is provided to improve messaging for Western audiences: Supervisors hand out topical talking points to include in coordinated messaging, workers’ content is edited, and output is audited, with rewards given to more productive workers.

One telltale sign of bots stems from a group of accounts that tweet much more frequently than typical humans—or accounts that tweet on exact intervals, say, every five minutes. The bot-driven accounts may lack typical profile elements such as profile pictures (see also: the generic Twitter egg) and often don’t engage in replies with other social-media accounts. In addition to spreading fake news, “they can also amplify marginal voices and ideas by inflating the number of likes, shares and retweets they receive, creating an artificial sense of popularity, momentum or relevance,” the Oxford team reported recently.

While it’s difficult for researchers to untangle how many Twitter bots are Russian-controlled, they regularly see Russian accounts in the mix: For example, on Twitter, they found accounts following Donald Trump that tweeted most frequently during Russian business hours and switched regularly between English and Cyrillic.

On Facebook, it’s much more challenging to sort out which content is bot-driven, says Bradshaw. That’s in part because on Facebook, bots typically operate pages or groups, which can be even more opaque than individual accounts.

The Oxford researchers also found that bots infiltrated the core conversations among their Twitter data during the election period—and several of their analyses revealed that bots supported Trump much more than Hillary Clinton. A separate research effort by Emilio Ferrara at University of Southern California, cited in Oxford’s report, determined that about one fifth of campaign-related tweets during the month before the election likely was generated by bots. Ferrara’s team recorded 4 million tweets in that time period posted by about 400,000 bots.

In the days before the Sept. 24 parliamentary election, the Oxford researchers found that political bots were minimally active on Twitter in Germany. The most tweets tracked were in support of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, which won 13 percent of the vote and became the first far-right party to earn a presence in Parliament in 60-plus years. The research also found that Germans were much less likely to share fake news stories than their American counterparts, sharing links from professional news organizations four times as often as links from sites pushing fake news. Researchers theorize that voters in Germany and other parts of Europe may have been inoculated to the effects of bot-driven fake news, thanks to the ongoing fallout from 2016. “I would speculate the Russians overplayed their hand in the US elections,” Bradshaw says. “Voters in the US weren’t really prepared, but that was part of the discourse in other countries like Germany.”

But the battle is only beginning. In the hands of bad operators “the bots get a bit smarter,” Bradshaw says. When those controlling them realize that the bots are being tracked, for example, they may adjust the frequency that they tweet in order to fly below researchers’ radar. Bradshaw also notes that voice-simulation technology combined with video-simulation technology is making it increasingly possible to create fake news—say, a video showing politicians making statements that they never actually said. “In innovations in technology,” she cautions, “the attackers always have the advantage.”

Millions of tweets were flying furiously in the final days leading up to the 2016 US presidential election. And in closely fought battleground states that would prove key to Donald Trump’s victory, they were more likely than elsewhere in America to be spreading links to fake news and hyper-politicized content from Russian sources and WikiLeaks, according to new research published Thursday by Oxford University.

Nationwide during this period, one polarizing story was typically shared on average for every one story produced by a professional news organization. However, fake news from Twitter reached higher concentrations than the national average in 27 states, 12 of which were swing states—including Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan, where Trump won by slim margins.

About a fifth of this traffic was generated by bots. As we used to say back in the day, read the whole thing.

The Trump Voter ParadoxNew York Times
And the clout of the authoritarian, white identity wing of the Republican Party is such that Trumpis governing to please this wing first and foremost. From his apocalyptic threats to Kim Jong-un to his call for the firing of protesting N.F.L. players …

Facebook Russian Ads That Influenced Election Released To Congressnews9.com KWTV
Facebook has agreed to disclose ads to Congress that were purchased by Russians on the social media platform in that country’s effort to influence the 2016 election, the company announced Thursday. CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the brief announcement in …

Twitter to talk to House, Senate in Russia probeNew York Daily News
FILE- This April 26, 2017, file photo shows the Twitter app on a mobile phone in Philadelphia. Social media giant Twitter will visit Capitol Hill Sept. 28, as part of the House and Senateinvestigations into Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

The department sent a letter to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley on Sept. 22 after Grassley said he was preparing subpoenas for the two to appear. But the department said Jim Rybicki and Carl Ghattas could only speak to the committee if they avoided questions “directly relating to, or interfering with” the investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller.

Both Mueller and the Judiciary Committee are probing President Donald Trump’s firing of Comey in May and Russian interference in the 2016 election.

In a letter Wednesday, Grassley asked the department for clarification, saying he would still subpoena the witnesses if they wouldn’t talk about certain topics.

The Latest: Senate able to interview 2 FBI officialsWashington Post
WASHINGTON — The Latest on congressional investigations into Russia’s interference in the2016 election (all times local):. 7:30 p.m.. The Justice Department has agreed to allow the Senate Judiciary Committee to interview two FBI officials close to …and more »